Notes Introduction: Cross-Dressing and Cross-Casting 1. Dorothy Keyser, “Cross-Sexual Casting in Baroque Opera: Musical and Theatrical Conventions,” Opera Quarterly 5:4 (Winter 1987–88): 46–57 (46). 2. All quotations from Ecclesiazusae are taken from David Barrett’s trans- lation, Penguin Classics, London: Penguin, 1978. 3. Jeffrey Henderson, “Older Women in Attic Old Comedy,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 117 (1987): 105–29 (118). 4. “The Myth of Shakespeare’s Squeaking Boy Actor—Or Who Played Cleopatra?” Shakespeare Bulletin 19: 2 (Spring 2001), consulted online. 5. See their edited volume, En travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 3, 5. 6. See Republic, Books 3 and 10. 7. In the seventeenth century, the concept of homosexuality as such did not exist. A man might choose to participate in acts of sodomy, but he was not considered to be a homosexual. Same-sex relations between women were even less clearly understood or defined. See Joseph Harris, Hidden Agendas: Cross-Dressing in 17th-Century France, Biblio 17: 156, Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2005, 27–28. 8. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London: Routledge, 1990, 137. 9. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, London: Penguin, 1993. 10. See her book The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 11. The related topic of disguise plots (i.e., cross-dressing as opposed to cross-casting) during much the same period is the subject of Georges Forestier’s monumental tome Esthétique de l’identité dans le théâtre français (1550–1680), Geneva: Droz, 1988. See also John D. Lyons, A Theatre of Disguise: Studies in French Baroque Drama (1630–1660), Columbia, SC: French Literature Publications Company, 1978, and Joseph Harris, Hidden Agendas. 164 Notes 12. The first major study of cross-casting in Shakespeare was W. Robertson Davies’s speculative and gloriously opinionated Shakespeare’s Boy Actors, London: Dent, 1939. This was followed by, among others, Michael Shapiro’s Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, Stephen Orgel’s Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, and Dympna Callaghan’s Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage, London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Chapter I Unattractive Women: Cross-Casting in Comedy 1. For an excellent study of attitudes toward cross-casting in England, see Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 2. See Henry Phillips, The Theatre and its Critics in Seventeenth-Century France, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, 174. 3. Tertullian, De Spectaculis, trans. Pierre de Labriolle, Paris: 1937, 26. Cited in Phillips, The Theatre and its Critics, 177. 4. Ph. Vincent, Traité des théâtres, La Rochelle, 1647, 8. Cited in Phillips, The Theatre and its Critics, 202. 5. For an equally excellent study of the impact of the professional actress in England, see Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 6. See Lynette R. Muir, “Women on the Medieval Stage: The Evidence from France,” Medieval English Theatre 7:2 (1985): 107–19. Documents dealing with Passion plays produced in Mons in 1501 and in nearby Valenciennes in 1547 include a small number of roles for “junes filles” (young girls), but none for married women. Elsewhere in France, married women did perform, for instance in a 1509 production in Romans of the Trois Doms, which included eleven women in its cast, nine of whom were married. In this instance, only one female role was taken by a man: that of Proserpina. Similarly, women performed in a 1526 production of the Trois Martyrs in Valence. Muir also gives details of the one recorded example of a women playing Mary in a Passion play, of an actress of unknown age playing the eponymous saint in a production at Metz of St. Catherine in 1468, and a woman playing in the Vie de Sainte Barbe in Nancy in the early sixteenth century. 7. The rise of the Italian actress as a permanent fixture coincided almost exactly with the birth and development of the commedia dell’arte tradi- tion in the sixteenth century, and her presence constituted an integral part of the originality of this particular brand of theatre. See Rosamond Gilder, Enter the Actress: The First Women in the Theatre, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931; New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1960, 57. Notes 165 8. See Gilder, Enter the Actress, 56. Unfortunately, Gilder provides no reference for this quotation. 9. I return to the effects of the papal ban on female performers in my discussion of castrati in chapter V. 10. Gustave Attinger, L’esprit de la commedia dell’arte dans le théâtre français, Paris: Librairie théâtrale/Neuchatel: A la Baconnière, 1950, 98. 11. Bernard Jolibert, La commedia dell’arte et son influence en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, Paris and Montreal: Harmattan, 1999, 39. 12. La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, Venice: Somasco, 1585. Cited in French in Attinger, L’esprit de la commedia dell’arte, 45. 13. Le Théâtre de l’Hôtel de Bourgogne, 2 vols., Paris: Nizet, 1968–70, I: 26. Deierkauf-Holsboer writes the “Hôtel de Bourbon,” but she must mean the Hôtel de Bourgogne. The French parliament, however, disap- proved of the performance, doubtless owing in part to the appearance of women on stage. 14. Isaac Du Ryer, Le Temps perdu, Paris: Du Bray, 1610, 65–66. 15. Léopold Lacour, Les premières actrices françaises, Paris: Librairie Française, 1921, 9. 16. See M. Barras, The Stage Controversy in France from Corneille to Rousseau, New York: Publications of the Institute of French Studies, 1933. 17. Maximes et réflexions sur la comédie, reproduced in Urbain and Levesque (eds.), L’Eglise et le théâtre, Paris: Grasset, 1930, 167–279 (267–68). 18. Sentiments de l’Eglise et des saints Pères, Paris, 1694. Cited in Phillips, The Theatre and its Critics, 187. 19. J. de Voisin, La Défense du traitté de Monseigneur le prince de Conti, Paris, 1671, Lettre I, 477. Cited in Phillips, The Theatre and its Critics, 188. 20. Jan Clarke, “Women Theatre Professionals in 17th-Century France” in Women in European Theatre, ed. Elizabeth Woodrough, London: Intellect, 1995: 23–31 (23). See Mme du Noyer, Lettres historiques et galantes, I: 15, in P. Mélèse, Le Théâtre et le public à Paris sous Louis XIV (1659–1715), Paris: Droz, 1934; Geneva, 1976, 176. 21. See P. Mélèse, Le Théâtre et le public, 174. 22. See Le Théatre François, ed. Georges Monval, Lyon: Guignard, 1674; Paris: Bonnassies, 1875. 23. J. de Courbeville, La Critique du Théâtre Anglois, comparé au Théâtre d’Athènes, de Rome et de France, et l’Opinion des auteurs tant profanes que sacrez, touchant les Spectacles, Paris, 1715, v. See M. Barras, The Stage Controversy in France, 144. 24. It should be noted that the principal female roles in these plays were performed by actresses; probably by Mlle Le Noir and Mlle Villiers who were then the leading actresses of Mondory’s troupe (soon to be called the Troupe du Marais). 25. Henry Lyonnet, Les “Premières” de P. Corneille, Paris: Delagrave, 1923, 28. 26. Such was Alizon’s close association with playing grotesque, elderly women, he even lent his stage name to a number of contemporary plays, including Discret’s Alizon (1637). 166 Notes 27. See Barbara C. Bowen, Les Caractéristiques essentielles de la farce française et leur survivance dans les années 1550–1620, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 53, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964, 14, 51 and 111. 28. See G. J. Mallinson, The Comedies of Corneille: Experiments in the Comic, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, 1–7 (3). 29. Neither does he comment on the shift from cross-casting to straight casting, even when he refers to Corneille’s own discussion of this very transition (77). Similarly, Théodore Litman cites Corneille’s words and fails to comment on either the fact or the implications of the cross-casting mentioned. See Théodore A. Litman, Les comédies de Corneille, Paris: Nizet, 1981, 93. 30. Louis Rivaille, Les débuts de P. Corneille, Paris: Boivin, 1936, 194. 31. Unfortunately, we only have Chapelle’s side of the correspondence in which he writes of “le déplaisir que vous donnent les partialités de vos trois grandes actrices pour la distribution de vos roles” (the displeasure you felt at the preferences of your three great actresses with regard to the dis- tribution of your roles). Cited in G. Michaut, La Jeunesse de Molière, Paris: Hachette, 1922, 182. 32. “Discours à Cliton sur les Observations du Cid,” in La Querelle du Cid, ed. Armand Gasté, Paris: Weller, 1898; Geneva: Slatkine, 1970, 241–82 (265). 33. In addition to stimulating the introduction of new types of female roles in comedy, actresses also encouraged the development of tragedy—the theatrical genre for which the century is probably best known today. Tragedy was for obvious reasons considered a more respectable genre than its comic counterpart and therefore a more appropriate genre for women to perform. While it is clear that early French actresses did perform in comedies and even in vulgar farces, their professional ambition appears to have centred around tragic drama, as they sought to gain their reputation from performing the female roles of playwrights such as Corneille and, later, Racine. 34. See Roger W. Herzel, The Original Casting of Molière’s Plays, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981, 21. 35.